As we rapidly approach the end of the second quarter of 2009 there is still news trickling in from what happened in Q1. As suspected, that news is not good. A study by TNS Media Intelligence was reported in today’s WSJ and ad spend for media including TV, print and online display ads fell 14% year to year to $30.8 billion.
What’s Robert Scoble Building in Building43?
Back in March, popular blogger and technical evangelist Robert Scoble announced that he was leaving Fast Company. Now he works at Rackspace and is building what is being called a "community for people fanatical about the Internet." This is called Building43.
T-Mobile Hacked, Data For Sale?
A hacker group has claimed to have hacked T-Mobile this past weekend and is apparently looking to cash in. Oh this world we live in, right? (Editor’s Note: Be sure to read the update from T-Mobile at the end of the article)
Yahoo Giving Out $20K in Search Marketing Credits
Yahoo is launching a campaign with Bank of America this week, which a spokesperson for Yahoo tells Murdok is essentially "a big online push for BofA to build visibility and facilitate dialogue in the small business community."
Yahoo’s Small Business Answers Center is designed for small business owners with "great ideas and good questions," who don’t always get credible answers.
EU Calls On US To End Online Gambling Ban
The European Commission has released a report that finds U.S. laws on Internet gambling are not legally justified and discriminate against foreign Internet gambling operators.
VideoSurf Claims Next Level of Video Search Relevancy
VideoSurf is a video search engine I’ve written about in the past. Today, the company unveiled its latest release.
Murdok received an email from them, and a spokesperson tells us, "VideoSurf is taking video search to the next level." He mentioned the following highlights:
Online Ads Contribute $300 Billion To U.S. Economy
Online advertising contributes $300 billion to the U.S. economy, according to a new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
The ad supported Internet accounts for 2.1 percent of the total U.S. gross domestic product. It directly employs more than 1.2 million Americans with above-average wages in jobs that did not exist two decades ago, and another 1.9 million people work to support those with Internet-related jobs.
Local Content Popular With Mobile Users
The number of people looking for local information on a mobile device grew 51 percent from March 2008 to March 2009, according to comScore.
The mobile browser is the most popular access method for finding local information, with 20.7 million users in March 2009, up 34 percent over a year ago. The strongest growth in the category is coming from downloaded applications, which grew 83 percent compared to a year ago, followed by SMS at 72 percent.
Does Google Recognize the Name of Your Business?
People misspell their search engine queries all the time. That is why it can be incredibly helpful when Google steps and offers "did you mean suggestions."
Google actually offers a few different spell-check features in its search results. These come with the internal codenames: "Did you mean," "Chameleon" (mid-page suggestions), and "Spellmeleon," where a couple results are shown for the corrected query.
The Changing Landscape of Twitter
A study was released today, conducted by inbound marketing company HubSpot, which looked at 4.5 million Twitter users over a nine month period.